Paths not taken
If angst, lovesickness, and ennui alone made for half-decent poetry, just about every moody high school student would be in the running for the Pulitzer Prize. Although strong emotion has been vital to many artistic movements, from Romanticism on, simply placing emotions on a page seldom produces poetry that’s worthwhile. Indeed, Oscar Wilde was on to something when he remarked that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”—or as it is often paraphrased, “all bad poetry is sincere.” Even if Wilde is right (and he probably is), there is also a case to be made that good poetry can be sincere. Dana Gioia proves it with this funny, insightful and wise collection.
As befits an artist largely devoid of artifice, Gioia’s collection contains exactly what the cover promises: 99 poems (15 of them never before collected) by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Bush II administration and recently named poet laureate of California. As Gioia says in his very brief notes, the collection is “arranged by theme, not by chronology, because it is designed for the reader rather than the scholar.” This organization is commendable: It lets readers see Gioia’s artistic development and development of ideas in ways that the more common strict chronological order wouldn’t.
The poems that launch from Gioia’s own emotions work well, in part, because they offer intellectual insight coupled with a becoming sincerity. What might be the most personal poem here, “Pentecost” (subtitled “After the death of our son”), does not just capture his feelings of loss for a son but also explores them in a way that universalizes them. Gioia opens with an arresting intellectual image: his country.
Neither the sorrows of afternoon, waiting in the silent house,
Nor the night no sleep relieves, when memory
Repeats its prosecution.
The phrase “repeats its prosecution” is particularly insightful: Memory of love lost can be an oppressive thing that feels almost like a prosecutor. Gioia continues with the theme, saying that no “prayers / improvised to an unknowable god / Can extinguish the flame.” He concludes with the realization that the pain will never go away: “I offer you this scarred and guilty hand / Until others mix our ashes.” Not uplifting at all, but honest and telling nonetheless.
But if Gioia is eloquent with his own emotions, he does just as well with characters summoned out of his imagination. One of the three longer narrative poems here, “Homecoming,” aims to get inside the mind of a murderer who, rejected by his birth parents and taught a twisted hyper-Calvinism by a cruel foster mother, rejects God and embraces darkness. On deciding his path to evil, the killer muses:
That night I knew I would go to Hell,
and it would be a place just like my room—
dark, suffocating, with its door shut tight,
and even if my mother were there too,
she wouldn’t find me. I’d always be alone.
This leads to a life torturing animals, “pulling petty robberies,” and eventually spending time in prison, where his beliefs harden. The narrator escapes from prison, killing more on the way, and returns to his home to kill his stepmother.
But he soon realizes that the thrills he got from committing crimes were only “the phony high / that violence unleashes in your blood” and concludes that when he saw his stepmother’s “body lying on the floor” he “knew that we would always be together”—with her rejection of God’s love and his bringing them to a rough equality in death. This poem and several others might fairly be accused of lapsing into cliché at times, but when it comes to Gioia’s fundamental poetic purpose, it’s still a success.
Not every poem needs to delve into theology to show insight. His deceptively simple “Summer Storm,” written in rhyming couplets, tells a brief story of a onetime connection during a storm at a party—”To my surprise, you took my arm, a gesture you didn’t explain”—that leads the narrator to muse, 20 years later:
There are so many might-have-beens,
What ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.
And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.
This is simple and clear but also a clever, even profound, observation about the nature of memory and the regrets for paths not taken that play a role in nearly every human life. Gioia plays with the same themes of brief connection and regret in the ironically titled “Being Happy,” which tells the story of a brief romantic fling that fizzled when the speaker’s newfound lover left town—which leads him to conclude that “Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close. / You recognize it later from the ache of memory.” Again, it’s clear, sincere and telling.
None of this is to say that Gioia can’t be challenging. His “The Gods of Winter” (the title poem of a 1991 collection) is a lyrically beautiful reflection on memory, loss and relationships. It rewards dozens of rereadings to untangle and decode. And when Gioia tries to be funny (which isn’t often), he’s a hoot. The best example here is probably “Title Index to my Next Book of Poems,” which includes “More Fun in Stalingrad” and “Envy as an Art Form.”
Dana Gioia is a very good poet but isn’t beyond criticism. In addition to occasional lapses into cliché, he’s a bit limited in his thematic content: A few big themes like memory, loss, and love dominate the collection to the exclusion of all others. And those looking for poetry to provide uplift won’t find it here: Almost none of his poems is outright happy or optimistic. But 99 Poems is well worth reading, and if nothing else, proof positive that good poetry can also be sincere.
